technical-writing

technical-writing is a skill for Claude Code from ericlitman/open-pstack. It costs 52 tokens per session (2,619 once invoked), scanned A, a copy of technical-writing, MIT.

A standard for writing technical documentation, such as guides, readmes, design proposals, pull-request descriptions, and commit messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write or review developer-facing documentation and other technical text.
Why use it?
It helps tired developers understand instructions and explanations on the first read by using direct, precise language.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the pstack plugin — 52 skills, 12 agents, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to write or review developer-facing documentation and other technical text.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/technical-writing
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ericlitman/open-pstack --skill technical-writing
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericlitman/open-pstack

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install pstack, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 52 skills, 12 agents, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for technical-writing

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/technical-writing.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/technical-writing)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/technical-writing"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericlitman/open-pstack/technical-writing.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 52 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,619 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin 95% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00052 $0.02619
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01309
Sonnet 5 $0.00010 $0.00524
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00262

Measured 2d ago against content hash fc19431e8104, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

technical-writing scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to technical-writing — 3 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

plugins/pstack/skills/technical-writing/SKILL.md · 130 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 130 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Technical writing

The goal is writing a tired engineer understands on the first read. Four layers get you there, one question each: what kind of document is this, how do sentences address the reader, how much does each sentence carry, and can any sentence be read two ways. Apply all four.

Three rules sit above the layers:

  • Cut every word that does no work. If the sentence survives without a word, the word goes. "In order to" is "to". "It is important to note that" is nothing.
  • Use the short, everyday word. "Use", not "utilize". "Help", not "facilitate". "Do", not "perform". A long word has to buy its length with precision.
  • When a rule makes a sentence worse, fix the sentence another way or leave it alone. The rules serve the reader. A sentence that follows every rule and sounds like a machine wrote it has failed.

The codebase is the word list. Write the real symbol, file, flag, or command name, not a synonym or a description of it.

Don't invent jargon. Use the words a developer would say out loud: "move", "delete", "a budget that only decreases", not "evacuate", "ratchet", or "endgame". A named pattern is fine when the doc says what it means the first time. Add new offenders to unslop's abstract-metaphor rule with their replacement.

Vary the rhythm

The layers decide what a document says and how much each sentence carries. A doc can obey all of them and still read machine-written: every sentence clipped short, no view anywhere, nothing specific.

  • Mix sentence lengths on purpose. Short sentences land a point. Longer ones that take their time carry a fact with its condition or consequence.
  • One thought per sentence does not mean one length per sentence. Split the sentence that carries two thoughts. Keep the long sentence that carries one.
  • Have a view where the mode allows it. Explanation weighs trade-offs, so say what you make of them instead of listing pros and cons. Reference stays dry.
  • Be specific over sterile. Not "schema changes can cause issues" but "a column rename fails the build".

Read the full file on GitHub · 130 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 130 lines · 52 tokens per session scan A fc19431e8104

Subscribe to this mod's changes

technical-writing is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericlitman/open-pstack (221 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 52 tokens to every session and 2,619 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to technical-writing, differing in 3 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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